Valve Is Developing Multiple New Game Titles Again Sparking Hope Of A Half-Life Revisit

One of the most popular game franchises to ever grace the PC was Half-Life, which hailed from Valve. Fans have wanted to delve back into the world of Gordon Freeman for many years now, and have all but given up any hope of Half-Life 3. The flames of hope for Half-Life 3 are starting to be stoked again with Valve's Gabe Newellhaving announced that Valve is "going to start shipping games again."

The first game is certainly not what fans hoped for; it's a game called Artifact, a Dota 2-themed card game that was announced last year. The good news is that Newell did clearly state that isn’t the only game Valve has plans for. Newell said that Artifact was "the first of several games" that Valve is working on. Newell did talk a bit about why Valve walked away from games.

Valve's Gabe Newell (Source: Benedikt Adam via Wikipedia)

He stated much of the reason was a concern that PCs were becoming more of a closed system. Valve now feels adept in both hardware and software design, thanks in part to investments in Vive. This comfort will impact the way Valve works on games moving forward apparently.

"The positive thing about the Vive is, in addition to making sure that nobody created an iOS closed platform for it, was also that it gave us the opportunity to develop our in-house expertise in hardware design. Five years ago, we didn't have electrical engineers and people who know how to do robots. Now there's pretty much no project in the hardware space that we wouldn't be comfortable taking on. We can design chips if we need to, we can do industrial design, and so on. So that added to that," said Newell in a PC Gamer interview.

Newell also said, "We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo. [Miyamoto] can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he's designing the software at the same time that's really going to take advantage of it."

Newell did participate in a Reddit AMA in January where he said that Valve is working on a new single-player game. He didn’t say it was Half-Life 3, but the hearts of Freeman fans everywhere are full of hope again. Newell recently squashed rumors that Microsoft was going to purchase Valve.